This weekend I read an article in Bitch magazine about Project Unbreakable. Last fall, then 19-year-old Grace Brown began photographing survivors of sexual assault holding posters with quotes from their attackers (or, in some cases, the police or others they told about the attack). It’s a powerful art project that highlights the emotional manipulation (“I love you,” or “If you tell your mom she’ll hate you for causing us to break up”) that often accompanies rape and sexual abuse. Collectively they illustrate many of the justifications perpetrators give. The quotes chosen by the survivors also make clear that the demands to keep the incident secret and the efforts of abusers to justify their behavior are as much a part of the attack as the physical element.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Comments 17

Xiao Mao — June 19, 2012

TRIGGER WARNING FOR MY COMMENT.

WOW. Very powerful, and triggering. But, worth it.

"I was just playing"- said to me by one of the men who raped me while I was unconscious.

Xiao Mao — June 19, 2012

[...] I had forgotten about the project (which I feel bad about) until Gwen Sharp blogged it today at Sociological Images. [...]

LynneSkysong — June 19, 2012

Thank you for posting this.

$ocraTTTe$ — June 20, 2012

You know, its really interesting that so few men have submitted pictures to Project Unbreakable.

You just never really hear much about male victims of sexual assault at all, which is weird because statistics from the Center for Disease Control's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence (www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/nisvs/ please refer to tables 2.1 and 2.2 on pages 18 and 19) show that in the last 12 months men and women have been victims of sexual assault at a pretty similar rate (6.7% of women vs 5.3% of men). These statistics were conducting using anonymous phone interviews of individuals, and did not include people in jail. With rates this close you'd expect to hear more about men being sexually assaulted, you'd expect more men show up in things like project unbreakable. You'd also expect there to be more prosecutions with male victims, but there aren't. And its not just that police or prosecutors ignore male victims, I've worked in a DA's office, men just straight up don't report at all, with some rare exceptions.Maybe men are experiencing milder forms of sexual assault, though those 12 month CDC numbers show that men report being forced to have penetrative sex (i.e. forced to put their penis inside some orifice against their will) at the same rate that women report being forced to have penetrative sex (i.e. have someone put something in an orifice against their will). That rate is 1.1% for both genders in the last 12 months, though the CDC has classified females being forcibly penetrated as rape and males being forced to penetrate against their will as "forced to penetrate," a much less culturally loaded term.

Maybe there is something wrong with the way the survey was conducted, but these statistics don't gel with the virtual invisibility of male rape, particularly male rape by females, which is actually quite common according to these numbers. Of the 1.1% of men forced to penetrate against their will in the last 12 months, 80% reported a female perpetrator.

I guess it is possible that men just silently suffer and just underreport at an even higher level than females, or maybe men don't experience rape in the same way. Maybe they don't even understand that sexual assault has happened to them. Society informs men that they are always horny and should always be down to have sex with women, and tells women that men always want to have sex with them. So maybe when a woman forces a man to have sex with her she doesn't even really understand that its wrong, after all, he's a guy, he's always horny. And maybe the guy just thinks he was supposed to like it.

I mean, who the fuck reports being raped by a woman? I've hung out with a lot of very liberal people, and in those circles rape of men by other men is understood to be a reality, but male rape by women? It isn't really acknowledged at all. Yet these statistics seem to show that it happens a lot, about 80% as often as women get raped by men.

Crazy shit man.

tldr;

Can someone please explain how these statistics can be true to me? There has to be a flaw in the methodology, right?

http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/nisvs/

diamonddame — June 21, 2012

this makes me so sad. especially the dad one. there is nothing more grotesque than the feelings of being betrayed ..used that way by your own parent.

G4G — June 29, 2012

Very powerful. I think that as sad as it is to see, it needs to be shared.

Gunn — November 7, 2013

Rape is not just something that happens to women. Molestation is not something that only happens to women. Its not fair to act like its just about womens rights, its about EVERYONES rights to feel safe, and not fear being victimized or mocked for it. We have made victimization a female thing, we pretend that men need to just suck it up, that it doesn't happen if your a real man. We need to stop and see it for what it is, something that makes anyone it happens to feel very alone and very lost. I was a victim, many times over in my life, terrible things like rape and molestation and beatings happened to me. And one day i realized im not a victim, im a survivor. And that people like me being open about what happened and giving voice to those to scared to come forward is the only way we are going to change anything. Praise be to the men and women who come forward, who show others they are not alone.